As digital marketers, terms like “personas”, “conversions” and “leads” are commonplace in day-to-day discussions with our clients. We refer to these concepts to help businesses understand how they can connect with their audiences, produce valuable content, and drive positive business results.

One of the tools we use to help digital marketers is the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud (DEC). The DEC combines everything worth knowing about personas, conversions, leads (and more!) in a digestible, easy to navigate platform. The DEC has helped us make sense of our conversions, leads, and audiences, which is why we widely recommend it to our clients and peers. 

Before you decide you are ready to start exploring the DEC or any other digital marketing work, you should understand the following basic concepts:

• Personas

• Conversions

• Known Contacts

• Touchpoints

• Lead Scoring

• Journey Timelines

This post is a primer on what these terms mean and how, in tandem, the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud can help you amplify your digital marketing strategy. And, if you decide you need a more in-depth walk-through of the DEC or want to jump right in, you can download our Getting Started with the Sitefinity Digital Experience Cloud whitepaper.

Personas

Personas are a stereotypical definition of one segment of your audience. They are assigned characteristics and demographics that help to shape and define them, for example: a name, location, age, occupation, accessibility needs, and interests. Personas help content creators and designers think about digital content can cater to the needs of different audiences or customer groups.

In the DEC, you can set up personas and view reports to tell you which audience segment uses your website the most. Most digital marketers already have an understanding of what a persona is and how it can inform their strategies. The DEC allows you to store those typical persona descriptions, but then you can take it one step further. With rules in the DEC, you can assign visitors to each persona based on their activity on your website. If you choose to do nothing else in the DEC, just setting up your personas will be quite valuable.

Conversions

A conversion is the moment when a user on your website performs a desired action. Until that point, the user has been browsing your website somewhat generally. Conversions are what you want to see happen on your website. For example, you want users to get in touch, download a file, watch a video, make a purchase, RSVP to an event, share some content. Each of these actions can be a conversion. 

If you are using the DEC, take some time to define what qualifies as a conversion and start to track when users are making these desired actions. Once you’re comfortable, set up multiple conversions for maximum results. 

Known Contacts

Traffic on your website is anonymous until some form of identifiable information is provided by the user. For example, a contact form can be defined as a conversion point which will move a user from being anonymous to being a known contact. 

Flywheel can also help connect your existing email marketing list into the DEC so you can capture more data about your existing known contacts. At the point a user becomes a known contact, the DEC can also associate the old anonymous traffic generated by the same user so you have a complete picture of their interaction with your website.

Touchpoints

Touchpoints are any interaction that a user has with you, or your content. A touchpoint can be a webpage, video, download, phone call, email and so on. For larger campaigns or groups of content it might help to think of several pieces of content as one touchpoint. For example, a collection of case studies could be thought of together as one touchpoint.

Once you have conversions set up, the DEC will provide reports on which touchpoints influenced a user to complete that conversion. This data helps you know which content on your website is the most valuable. With touchpoint tracking you know which content helps drive users to the desired outcome. This information is wonderful feedback for your content team and informs your overall marketing strategy.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring helps you cut through the clutter. If your conversions are working well, it might help to know which users are the MOST interested in what you have to offer. Those most interested users would be assigned more points and score higher. You can then group your leads by score and focus on them differently based on those groupings.

Lead scoring in the DEC is just the same. This feature allows you to set up rules to further identify and classify these valuable users. The configuration of lead scoring assigns points based on what users have done in the past or in the future. Whereas conversions tell you who each user is, lead scoring continues to track them to help identify more specifically what they are interested in. This helps know who to reach out to first.

Journey Timeline

The path that a user takes while navigating your website is often referred to as the “User Journey”. It can be helpful for marketers to plan content writing based on an expectation of those typical user journeys. It is common practice to define an optimal or expected journey for each of your personas.

Overtime you will want to know if users are actually following the expected journey from your marketing strategy. The DEC can help clarify how users are consuming your content. The DEC can provide a complete picture of a known contact’s interaction with your website from their first anonymous visit, right up to their most recent activity (this feature does rely on cookies that need to be left alone by your user). In the DEC, you can explore your contact list and see what we mean. Each known contact has a journey timeline available with details about where they came from and what content they were interested in on your website. 

Reviewing the journey timeline for an individual known contact in the DEC can also help your sales team have a much more meaningful conversation as you continue your outreach efforts. 

Additional Concepts

The concepts and definitions we have touched on in this post are a few of the basics that help with digital marketing strategies. Of course, there are more terms to familiarize yourself with and there are even more features and capabilities in the DEC that you’ll be ready for once you’ve mastered the concepts outlined in this post. 

Get in touch when you’re ready to tackle anything we’ve just talked about or the additional features we haven’t touched on in this post, including:

• Recommendations

• Campaigns

• A/B tests

• Personalization

Dive In!

As we mentioned at the top of this post, if you’re ready to get started, our whitepaper is a helpful guide. Included in the whitepaper is a Getting Started Checklist.

> Download the Getting Started with the DEC whitepaper